Chapter Twenty-Two
JAYCEON
I am not a man who moves fast.
I've been told this. My older sister, Freya, has used the phrase geologically paced in my presence more than once, not without affection. I think things through. I let things develop. I watch how something fits before I name it.
What I can tell you about Aviance is this: there was no slow reveal.
Everything she is was visible from the first day in the studio — the intelligence, the precision, the warmth that she keeps controlled not because she's cold but because she knows its value.
I watched her develop over months and what I saw was not change so much as expansion. She grew into more room.
Freya meets her in September, at a dinner at my apartment.
I make the pasta. Aviance brings wine and the kind of focused attention she brings to everything — she helps Freya with her jacket, asks two questions that make Freya immediately invested in answering them, and by the time we're at the table they're talking about the acoustic design of a venue Freya's firm is working on and I am sitting there watching the two most direct women I have ever known discover each other.
Afterward, Freya finds me in the kitchen.
"Jayceon," she says.
"I know," I say.
"She's—"
"I know."
"Don't mess it up."
"Freya."
"I'm serious." She tops up her wine. "I know you. You overthink and then you under-communicate because you've already lived the conversation in your head. Don't do that with her. She's the kind of person who needs the real version, not the edited one."
"I know that," I say.
"Good." She takes her wine back to the table. "The pasta was good too."
In November I finish the custom piece I've been building in the studio — a full dining table in quartersawn white oak, four inches thick, nine feet long, with a natural live edge on one side that I spent three weeks deciding how to preserve.
It's for Aviance's apartment.
She doesn't know yet.
I've been documenting the build with the kind of care you bring to something that is partially functional and partially a letter.
In the photos the grain moves like water through stone and the edge is raw and deliberate and true to what the tree was, and when I finally finish the last oil coat and step back and look at it I know it's the best piece I've made.
She comes to the studio on a Thursday morning, for coffee, the way she does every week now. She has her laptop and a sketchbook and she's usually there to work but what we actually do is work in comfortable parallel until one of us says something and it turns into a conversation.
She comes in, sees the table, and stops.
"Jayceon."
"It's for you," I say.
She puts her things down slowly and walks around it, running her hand along the top the way she ran her hand along the first table, that first morning, but this time there's no professional distance. She circles it completely, traces the live edge with two fingers.
"It's the most beautiful thing I've seen," she says.
"You can say that about things other than furniture, too."
She looks at me.
"Are you trying to be charming?"
"Yes," I say. "Is it working?"
She crosses the studio and kisses me in the middle of the sawdust and the morning light.
"Help me get it in the truck," she says. "I want it home."